LITMIR.BIZ

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She let out a humorless laugh and sank onto the bench across from him. “But I’ve come too far to give up now.”

      What did that mean? He suddenly realized he’d been so distracted by seeing her again that he’d failed to dig into why she was here. He knew what Carlton could offer Brenna: money. But what could she offer him, especially now that she’d made it clear sex was off the table? She said she worked in the foster care system, not exactly the sort of connection Carlton would need.

      “What exactly is your arrangement with Carlton?” Marcos asked.

      She fidgeted, as though she’d been hoping to avoid this question. “I can get him information he needs.”

      The answer was purposely vague and Marcos raised an eyebrow.

      “How about you, Marc-O?” she pressed. “What can you give him?”

      “A new network,” Marcos answered simply, wishing he didn’t have to lie to her. Wishing it didn’t come so easily. But that was good—it meant all his training had worked if he could even lie to Brenna.

      “For drugs? How?”

      It was time to get off this topic and convince Brenna to rethink her decision to stay here. “Carlton is dangerous,” Marcos said softly.

      “Yeah, no kidding,” she replied, looking him over again.

      Her voice cracked as she asked, “How badly are you hurt?”

      “Could have been worse. Thank you for that. Where’d you learn to fight?”

      Her legs jiggled a little, a clear sign he was about to get less than the full truth. “Foster care.” She glanced around, then lowered her voice. “Not all of us can find long-lost family.”

      “Yeah, well...” Now it was his turn to feel antsy, but he’d had a lot of practice being undercover. So why did lying to her feel so wrong? “Carlton doesn’t know about my years in foster care, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

      She tipped her head, like she was waiting for more details, but he stayed silent. Better if she just kept her mouth shut about his past altogether. Because the story Carlton knew didn’t match up with Marcos ever having been in foster care.

      As far as Carlton knew, he’d grown up in the massive Costrales family, where joining organized crime was in the blood. The DEA had backstopped a story for him that involved being a bit estranged from his family, but still on the payroll. As far as they could tell, Carlton’s empire didn’t yet stretch to the area the Costrales family ran, but there was no way to prepare for all possible overlap.

      On paper, Marco Costrales was the youngest son of Bennie Costrales, born of a mistress. He hadn’t grown up with the Costrales name, but he’d been given it—and a large sum of money to build his own empire—when he’d hit eighteen. On paper, Marco had gone to jail a few times, but never for anything major. Just enough to show he was in deep to something the Feds couldn’t prove.

      It was their best way in, because years of trying to infiltrate Carlton’s organization had proved he wasn’t willing to work with anyone he didn’t know. This was the DEA’s way of upping the ante, because they knew Carlton had always wanted to expand his connections. The problem was, if Carlton had a personal connection to the Costrales family they didn’t know about and he asked about Marco, he’d quickly find there was no such person.

      And then today’s beating would look like a party in comparison to what would happen to Marcos.

      “How are Cole and Andre?” Brenna asked, bringing him back to the present. “The three of you are still family, too, I assume? Even after your biological family came into the picture?”

      Was that wistfulness in her voice? Had she never found anyone to call family in all her years in the system?

      He knew it happened. He’d bounced around from one foster home to the next from birth until he was seven. Then he’d landed in the foster home with Cole Walker and Andre Diaz, and for the first time in his life, he’d realized how little blood mattered. These were the brothers of his heart. Five years later, when their house had burned down, they’d been split up until each of them had turned eighteen. And now they lived within an hour of one another and saw each other all the time. The way real brothers would.

      “They’re doing good. Both are getting married in the next year.” He didn’t mention their profession, because how could he explain being a drug dealer if he told her Cole was a police detective and Andre an FBI agent?

      “Did they ever put you back together?” She twisted her hands together, like she knew she was getting into dangerous territory.

      “You mean after you set the house on fire?”

      She flushed. “I didn’t know you realized... I was young. It was stupid.”

      “Why was our foster father in the back of the house with you when that fire started?” It was something he’d been wondering—and dreading finding the answer to—for months. He’d never expected to be able to ask Brenna herself.

      “What?”

      Brenna’s eyes widened, and she had to be wondering how he’d known that when he shouldn’t have even known she’d set the fire in the first place. At the time, all the reports on the fire had called it an accident. Only recently had he seen an unsealed juvenile record showing that Brenna had set the fire. But it had been his brother who’d remembered that neither Brenna nor their foster father had been where they should have been when the fire started.

      The rest of the family had been upstairs in bed, asleep. So why had Brenna and their foster father been downstairs, in the back of the house, in his study?

      “How did you know that?”

      “Was he hurting you?” Marcos’s chest actually hurt as he waited for the answer.

      She shook her head. “No. It was...look, he found me in his office. I’d lit the candle, and he came in and I tossed it.”

      Why was he positive she was lying? “I don’t believe you.”

      She looked ready to run away on those more sensible shoes. “Why not? You said you knew I’d set the fire.”

      Marcos leaned back, studying her, wondering why she’d lie about the reasons for setting the fire, the reasons for his foster father being nearby, when she so easily admitted to setting it. His agent instincts were going crazy, but he wasn’t sure about what. “I meant, I didn’t believe you about why he was there.” There was way more here than he’d ever realized. “I think you owe me the truth.”

      “You, Cole and Andre were reunited, right? What does it matter now? I was upset about my mom’s death. I—”

      “I almost didn’t make it out of that house.” The fact was, it was amazing none of them had died in there that day.

      She sucked in an audible gasp.

      Those moments after he’d dived through the living-room window came back to him, Cole slamming into him, knocking him to the ground and patting out the fire that had caught the back of his pajamas. He remembered Brenna running around the side of the house a minute later, just as the ambulance doors had closed. He didn’t think she’d seen him, but it was the last memory he had of that day.

      Brenna’s terrified face, their house burning to the ground behind her.

      * * *

      “STAY HERE!”

      Her foster father’s voice rang in her ears now as clearly as if he was sitting right beside her, as clearly as if it was eighteen years ago. But back then, she couldn’t have moved if she’d tried.

      She’d been dry heaving into the grass, her lungs burning from all the smoke, her eyes swollen almost shut. The fire had caught fast. She wouldn’t have made it out of there at all if he hadn’t screamed at her, then yanked her right off her feet and ran for the back door.

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